Counter to what you’ve probably been thinking, I do have more to do than simply wax philosophic about what it means to be a provider of fundraising intelligence. I do sometimes go on a bit when I get passionate about a topic, and I realize that my last few blog posts have been heavy on the forty thousand feet and light on, well, the feet.
I’m going to let you in on a secret. Across the US, Canada, the United Kingdom, Europe, Australia, and a growing number of other places around the globe, there are more than 5,000 of us.
People who, at one time or other in our professional lives have faced bias and, at times, even open revulsion from the public or the very people we serve. Most of the time we face well-intentioned misunderstanding without even knowing it.
Imagine with me that it’s Saturday afternoon. You are flat out busy today, and tonight you have exactly two hours to prep and cook dinner for guests. One of the guests is a good friend, but the other two you don’t really know all that well. They are friends-of-friends in town for the weekend.
Is this the night that you’re going to pull out the 25-ingredient recipe for a gourmet French dinner? Julia’s cassoulet, perhaps?
This week I’m in England talking with our colleagues at The Factary in Bristol. Their offices are open-plan and I’m impressed at how collaborative they are, with each other and with their clients. I met with nearly everyone on the team to learn more about the kinds of projects they’re working on, what they each do to meet their clients’ needs and how they work together as a team. It’s really interesting to see the ways we’re the same and the ways we do things differently.
Back before I started my career in prospect research in 1987 at The University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, I was the assistant to the director of finance for the development office at the university. My responsibility was to help my boss Jean track all of the money the university received; she had to make sure it went into the right bucket and was distributed correctly.
Imagine that it’s 10 am on a Thursday morning and you have just discovered a new seven-figure prospect for your organization.
This prospect is an active volunteer and a recent donor.
She’s expressed a firm endorsement of your organization’s mission in the press, and she has undisputedly significant wealth.
You’re going to run down the corridor and tell everyone, right?
The gift that led to the billionaire
A friend and colleague of mine (who is one smart cookie) was researching a newly-identified prospect in his 30s. Although relatively young, Mr. Jones seemed to be on a steep upward trajectory in his career, and he had volunteered for the organization where she works on a number of recent occasions. She wanted frontline fundraisers to get to know him. When she started to write up the profile and filled in the section about his philanthropic gifts to her organization, Cookie noticed a tribute gift that was even higher than their “Hmm, look at that!” category. (That’s a stray gift in whatever amount that makes you do a double take when you see it). The tribute gift was given to her nonprofit on the occasion of Mr. Jones’s wedding by a Mr. Smith. “Now why would Mr. Smith give such a large amount in honor of Mr. Jones’s wedding? That seems overly generous,” she thought. As an experienced researcher, it didn’t take long before Cookie discovered that Mr. Smith was the head of a large, very recognizable family-owned company, and he had given the gift on the occasion of his daughter’s marriage to young Mr. Jones. Possibilities immediately opened up for both family and corporate sponsorship opportunities at the 7-figure level. Wow!
In my last post, I talked about four ways to speed up the flow of information from researcher to fundraiser, and I gave examples of the average amount of time it takes for research reports to be done.
The post prompted a reader to ask “How many pages is your average in-depth profile? What categories does your in-depth profile include?” It was a great question that deserves a more thorough answer than just a quick reply in a comment. [Read more…]
As a fundraiser constantly on the go, sometimes it might seem like it takes a long time to get a research profile back from an in-house prospect researcher or consultant. When you’ve got a meeting coming up or you need to prioritize your prospect pool in a hurry, I know that you really haven’t got a lot of extra time to wait. Here are four secrets to getting information back faster from your research partner:
1. Take care of your gold. Chances are that your nonprofit received a larger-than-normal number of gifts last month, and many of them came from new donors. The money that came in will help you do your important work, but the gold I’m talking about is the information that came with each gift. You’ve just started a relationship with someone new that you hope will last a lifetime, right? Here are a few things that your organization should pay attention to:
